Kevin Ham leans forward, sits up tall, closes his eyes, and begins to type -- into the air. He's seated along the rear wall of a packed ballroom in Las Vegas's Venetian Hotel. Up front, an auctioneer is running through a list of Internet domain names, building excitement the same way he might if vintage cars were on the block.
As names come up that interest Ham, he occasionally air-types. It's the ultimate gut check. Is the name one that people might enter directly into their Web browser, bypassing the search engine box entirely, as Ham wants? Is it better in plural or singular form? If it's a typo, is it a mistake a lot of people would make? Or does the name, like a stunning beachfront property, just feel like a winner?
When Ham wants a domain, he leans over and quietly instructs an associate to bid on his behalf. He likes wedding names, so his guy lifts the white paddle and snags Weddingcatering.com for $10,000. Greeting.com is not nearly as good as the plural Greetings.com, but Ham grabs it anyway, for $350,000.
Ham is a devout Christian, and he spends $31,000 to add Christianrock.com to his collection, which already includes God.com and Satan.com. When it's all over, Ham strolls to the table near the exit and writes a check for $650,000. It's a cheap afternoon.
Just a few years ago, most of the guys bidding in this room had never laid eyes on one another. Indeed, they rarely left their home computers. Now they find themselves in a Vegas ballroom surrounded by deep-pocketed bankers, venture-backed startups, and other investors trying to get a piece of the action.
And why not? In the past three years alone, the number of dotcom names has soared more than 130 percent to 66 million. Every two seconds, another joins the list.
But the big money is in the aftermarket, where the most valuable names -- those that draw thousands of pageviews and throw off steady cash from Google's and Yahoo's pay-per-click ads -- are driving prices to dizzying heights. People who had the guts and foresight to sweep up names shed during the dotcom bust are now landlords of some of the most valuable real estate on the Web.
The man at the top of this little-known hierarchy is Kevin Ham -- one of a handful of major-league "domainers" in the world and arguably the shrewdest and most ambitious of the lot. Even in a field filled with unusual career paths, Ham's stands out.
Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue. (Like all his financial details, Ham would neither confirm nor deny this figure.)
Working mostly as a solo operator, Ham has looked for every opening and exploited every angle -- even inventing a few of his own -- to expand his enterprise. Early on, he wrote software to snag expiring names on the cheap. He was one of the first to take advantage of a loophole that allows people to register a name and return it without cost after a free trial, on occasion grabbing hundreds of thousands of names in one swoop.
And what few people know is that he's also the man behind the domain world's latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type ".cm" instead of ".com" at the end of a domain name.
Try it with almost any name you can think of -- Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm -- and you'll land on a page called Agoga.com, a site filled with ads served up by Yahoo.
Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad -- as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code -- just as Germany runs all names that end with .de.
The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of all domains. Ham landed connections to the Cameroon government and flew in his people to reroute the traffic. And if he gets his way, Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) will be his as well.
"It's in the works," Ham says over lunch in his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. "That's why I can't talk about it." He's nearly as reluctant to share details about his newest company, called Reinvent Technology, into which he's investing tens of millions of dollars to build a powerhouse of Internet businesses around his most valuable properties.
Given Ham's reach on the Web -- his sites receive 30 million unique visitors a month -- it's remarkable that so few people know about him. Even in the clubby world of domainers, he's a mystery man. Until now Ham has never talked publicly about his business. You won't find his name on any domain registration, nor will you see it on the patent application for the Cameroon trick.
There are practical reasons for the low profile: For one, Ham's success has drawn enemies, many of them rivals. He once used a Vancouver post office box for domain-related mail -- until the day he opened a package that contained a note reading "You are a piece of s**t," accompanied by an actual piece of it.
Bitter domainers are one thing, lawyers another. And at the moment, Ham's biggest concern is that corporate counsels will come after him claiming that the Cameroon typo scheme is an abuse of their trademarks. He may be right, since this is the first time he's been identified as the orchestrator.
When asked about the .cm play, John Berryhill, a top domain attorney who doesn't work for Ham, practically screams into the phone, "You know who did that? Do you have any idea how many people want to know who's behind that?"
Kevin Ham is a boyish-looking 37-year-old, trim from a passion for judo and a commitment to clean living. His drink of choice: grapefruit juice, no ice. His mild demeanor belies the aggressive, work-around-the-clock type that he is. Ham frequently steers conversations about business back to the Bible. Not in a preachy way; it's just who he is.
The son of Korean-born immigrants, Ham grew up on the east side of Vancouver with his three brothers. His father ran dry-cleaning stores; his mother worked graveyard shifts as a nurse. A debilitating illness at the age of 14 led Ham to dream of becoming a doctor. He cruised through high school and then undergraduate work and medical school at the University of British Columbia.
Christianity had long been a mainstay with his family, but as an undergrad, he made the Bible a focal point of his life; he joined the Evangelical Layman's Church and attended regular Bible meetings. Ham recalls that it was about this time -- 1992 or 1993 -- that he was introduced to the Web. A church friend told him about a powerful new medium that could be used to spread the gospel.
"Those words really struck me," Ham says. "It's the reason I'm still working."
After he graduated from med school in 1998, Ham and his new bride took off for London, Ontario, for a two-year residency. By the second year, Ham had become chief resident, and when he wasn't rushing to the emergency room, he indulged his growing fascination with the Net, teaching himself to create websites and to code in Perl.
Information about Web hosting at the time was so scattered that Ham began creating an online directory of providers, complete with reviews and ratings of their services. He called it Hostglobal.com.
From there it was a short step to the business of buying and selling domains. About six months after he launched Hostglobal, Ham was earning around $10,000 per month in ad sales. But when one of his advertisers -- a service that sold domain registrations -- told him that a single ad was generating business worth $1,500 a month, Ham figured he could get in on that too.
It made sense: People shopping for hosting services were often interested in buying a catchy URL, so Ham launched a second directory, called DNSindex.com. Like similar services operating at the time, it gave customers a way to register domain names.
But Ham added the one feature that early domain hunters wanted most: weekly lists of available names, compiled using free sources he found on the Web. Some lists he gave away; others he charged as much as $50 for. In a couple of months, he had more than 5,000 customers.
By the time he finished his residency in June 2000, his two small Web ventures were pulling in more money in a month -- sometimes $40,000 -- than Ham made that year at the hospital. That was enough, he reasoned, to put off starting a medical practice for three more months, maybe six. "It just didn't make sense not to do it," he says.
With a new baby in tow, Ham and his wife moved back to Vancouver, settling into a one-bedroom apartment. Ham's timing, it turned out, was spot-on. Tech stocks were tumbling, dotcoms were folding left and right, and investors were fleeing the Web. More important to him, hundreds of thousands of valuable domain names that were suddenly considered worthless began to expire, or "drop." Ham and a handful of other trailblazers were ready to snap them up.
Figuring out when names would drop was tedious work.
At the time, Network Solutions controlled the best names; it was for a long time the only retail company, or registrar, selling .coms. It didn't say when expiring names would go back on the market, but twice a day it published the master list of all registered names -- the so-called "root zone" file (now managed by VeriSign (Charts)). It was a fat list of well over 5 million names that took hours to download and often crashed the under-powered PCs of the day.
So Ham wrote software scripts that compared one day's list with the next. Then he tracked names that vanished from the root file. Those names would be listed briefly as on hold, and Ham figured out that they would almost always drop five or six days later -- at about 3:30 a.m. on the West Coast. In the dark of night, Ham launched his attacks, firing up five PCs and multiple browsers in each. Typing furiously, he would enter his buy requests and bounce from one keyboard to the next until he snagged the names he wanted.
He missed a lot of them, of course.
Ham had no clue that there were rivals out there who were way ahead him, deploying software that purchased names at a rate that Ham's fingers couldn't match. Through registration data, he eventually traced many of those purchases to one owner: "NoName." Behind the shadowy moniker was another reclusive domain pioneer, a Chinese-born programmer named Yun Ye, who, according to people who know him, operated out of his house in Fremont, Calif.
By day Ye worked as a software developer. At night he unleashed the programs that automated domain purchases. (Ye achieved deity status among domainers in 2004 when he sold a portfolio of 100,000 names to Marchex , a Seattle-based, publicly traded search marketing firm, for $164 million. He then moved to Vancouver.)
Ham went back to the keyboard, writing scripts so that he, too, could pound at the registrars. Ham's track record began to improve, but he still wasn't satisfied. "Yun was just too good," he says.
Then Ham did something brash: He bought his way to the front of the line. Since registrars had direct connections to Network Solutions's servers, Ham's play was to cut out the middleman. He struck deals with several discount registrars, even helping them write software to ensure that they captured the names Ham wanted to buy during the drops. In exchange for the exclusivity, Ham offered to pay as much as $100 for some names that might normally go for as little as $8.
Within weeks Ham had struck so many deals that, according to rivals, he controlled most of the direct connections. "I kept telling them to hit them harder," Ham says in a rare boastful moment. "We brought down the servers many times." During one six-month period starting in late 2000, Ham registered more than 10,000 names.
Rival domainers, locked out of much of the action, didn't appreciate Ham's tactics. It was one of them, most likely, who sent him the turd. "Kevin came in and closed the door for everyone else," says Frank Schilling, a domainer who figured out what Ham had done and sealed similar deals. "There was a ton of professional jealousy."
Ham, in fact, owes a lot to Schilling. Both men lived in Vancouver at the time, and after Ham sought out Schilling in November 2000, the two met at a restaurant to compare notes.
"How much traffic do you have?" Schilling asked. An embarrassed Ham replied that he had no idea. Schilling mentioned that he was experimenting with a new service, GoTo.com, that would populate his domains with ads. Ham spent the next week figuring out how much traffic his sites were generating, and he was amazed by the initial tally: 8,000 unique visitors per day from the 375 names he owned at the time.
"From then on," Ham says, "I knew that what I was building would be very, very valuable." He soon signed up with GoTo (which was later purchased by Yahoo). On his first day, Ham made $1,500.
The system worked then as it does now: People don't always use Google or Yahoo to find something on the Web; they'll often type what they're looking for into a browser's address bar and add ".com."
It's a practice known as "direct navigation," or type-in traffic, and millions do it. Need wedding shoes? Type in "weddingshoes.com" -- a site that Ham happens to own -- and you'll land on what looks like a shoe-shopping portal, filled with links from dozens of retailers.
Click on any one of those links, and the advertiser that placed it pays Yahoo, which in turn pays a cut to Ham. That single site, Ham says, brings in $9,100 a year. Small change, maybe, but the name cost him $8, and his annual overhead for it is about $7. Multiply that model several thousand times over, and you get a quick idea of the kind of cash machine that Ham was creating from his living room.
By early 2002, roughly $1 million a year was pouring into Ham's operation, which he ran with the help of his high school friend and current partner, Colin Yu. But again he felt the tug of his conscience. He occasionally left Vancouver to do medical missionary stints, helping patients in Mexico, the Philippines, and China. He found the experience rewarding, but the development boom he saw taking off in China just reminded him of the virtual real estate boom he was leading back home.
Soon Ham was back working full-time on the Web. "There was just too much more to do," he says.
There was no looking back. The next few years were among Ham's most aggressive. One of his most valuable tricks was one he had experimented with in the early days, a practice called domain "tasting." Tasting takes advantage of a provision that allows domain-name buyers a free five-day trial period. Intended to protect customers who mistakenly purchase the wrong name, it handed aggressive domainers another means with which to expand -- and exploit -- their portfolios.
Ham cobbled together new lists of domain words in every combination, registering hundreds of thousands of new names for free, monitoring the traffic, and then returning the duds. By 2004, Ham had amassed such a deep portfolio that he pulled his names from third-party registrars, launched his own registrar, and then created another company, appropriately named Hitfarm, that could do a better job than Yahoo of matching ads with domain names -- for himself and 100 or so other domainers.
Like any shopping spree, though, Ham's tasting binge didn't last. It brought in so many names -- offbeat strings of letters, names with too many dashes, and other variations that humans would be hard-pressed to think of -- that Ham saw the quality of his portfolio dropping in proportion to its growing size. For every few thousand names he'd register, he'd toss back all but a hundred or so.
Tasting exacerbated another problem too: Ham's software grabbed all kinds of typographical variations of trademarked names. Called typo-squatting, it's a practice now coming under the same intense scrutiny long faced by cybersquatters. Microsoft and Neiman Marcus are just two companies whose lawyers have brought anti-cybersquatting lawsuits, charging domainers with intentionally profiting from variations of their trademarks.
"Tasting changed everything," says Ham, who has since abandoned the practice, though he concedes that Hitfarm still holds some problematic names. "I said, forget it," he says. "Generic names are already too hard to come by. And the legal risks are too great."
The legal risks should diminish, however, if you don't own the domain names at all -- and that's the secret behind the Cameroon play.
The domain confab in Vegas is like any other trade conference: The real intrigue happens at cocktail hour. One subject in the air is Cameroon. Late last summer, domainers began noticing that something odd happens to .cm traffic: It all winds up at a site called Agoga.com. Domainers know, of course, that .cm belongs to Cameroon. And they know that whoever controls Agoga.com has created a potential gold mine.
What they don't know is who's behind it all.
At one of the meet-and-greets, Ham is standing drinkless, as usual, sporting a polo shirt, chatting with a few people he knows and some he's just met. In this crowd, it seems, everyone wants to know Ham. Finally, he is alone.
"I hear you're the guy behind .cm?"
Ham looks surprised by the reporter's question, then flashes a big smile and says, "I had help."
Over a series of conversations a few weeks later in Vancouver, Ham shares some details about a deal that, despite his innate reticence, he's clearly proud of. About a year ago, he says, he worked his contacts to gain connections to government officials in Cameroon. Then he flew several confidantes to Yaound?, the capital, to make their pitch. His key programmer went along to handle the technical details.
"Hey," Ham says, flagging his techie down near the office elevator. "Didn't you meet with the president of Cameroon?"
"Nah," the programmer says. "We met with the prime minister. But we did see the president's compound."
It's an odd scene to picture: a domainer's reps in a sit-down with Ephraim Inoni, the prime minister of Cameroon, to discuss the power of type-in typo traffic and pay-per-click ads. And yet, as with most of the angles Ham has played, the Cameroon scheme is ingeniously straightforward.
Ham's people installed a line of software, called a "wildcard," that reroutes traffic addressed to any .cm domain name that isn't registered. In the case of Cameroon, a country of 18 million with just 167,000 computers connected to the Internet, that means hundreds of millions of names. Type in "paper.cm" and servers owned by Camtel, the state-owned company that runs Cameroon's domain registry, redirect the query to Ham's Agoga.com servers in Vancouver.
The servers fill the page with ads for paper and office-supply merchants. (Officials at Yahoo confirm that the company serves ads for Ham's .cm play.) It all happens in a flash, and since Ham doesn't own or register the names, he's not technically typo-squatting, according to several lawyers who handle Internet issues.
The method is spelled out in a patent application filed by a Vancouver businessman named Robert Seeman, who Ham says is his partner in the venture and who also serves as chief adviser at Reinvent Technology. (Seeman declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Ham won't reveal specifics but says Agoga receives "in the ballpark" of 8 million unique visitors per month. Fellow domainers, naturally, are envious.
"As soon as it started happening, there was a huge sense of 'Why didn't I think of that?'" says attorney Berryhill, who represents Schilling and other domainers.
Still, several companies have already tracked down Ham's attorneys, claiming trademark infringement. Ham argues that his system is legally in the clear because it treats every.cm typo equally and doesn't filter out trademarked names.
Berryhill concurs. "You can't really say that [wildcarding] is targeting trade-marks," he says. "It captures all the traffic, not just trademark traffic." Moreover, the anti-cybersquatting statute applies only to people who register a trademarked domain; using a wildcard doesn't require registering names.
Clever though it may be, .cm is "a very small part of our operations," Ham says. He won't disclose how much he pays to the government of Cameroon, whose officials could not be reached for comment.
The partnership has been a rocky one so far, and the system has sporadically shut down. But .cm is only one of several country domains where the typo play can work. According to Ham, he and his team are working with other governments. The dream typo play -- .co -- belongs to Colombia, to which Ham says Seeman paid several visits long before they began working on Cameroon. (Citing safety concerns, Ham hasn't yet made the trip. "I would only go if the president requests to meet me," he says.)
As for other countries he might soon invade, Oman (.om) is an obvious target. Niger and Ethiopia are out there too, but since they would play off less lucrative .net typos, they might not be worth the trouble.
As for Colombia, Ham says, "we're making progress."
Ham leans over his office PC to check on a domain auction. Steven Sacks, a domainer based in Indianapolis who works for Ham, is telling him about some names up for sale. Ham shoots back an instant message: "I like doctordegree.com ... and rockquarry.com ... sunblinds.com."
The days of figuring out the drop are long over. Everything's open now. Lists are easy to obtain. You can preorder a name before it drops and hope to get it. Or, like Ham, you can shell out five or six figures in online auctions. The only great deals, at least for .com names, tend to happen privately, when a domainer manages to find an eager or naive seller.
Ham still buys 30 to 100 names a day, but he's no longer getting them on the cheap. In fact, he and Schilling, who today maintains a $20 million-a-year portfolio from his home in the Cayman Islands, are often accused of driving up prices.
Take, for example, the $26,250 Ham paid for Fruitgiftbaskets.com, or the $171,250 for Hoteldeals.com. "The amount he will pay is crazy," says Bob Martin, president of Internet REIT, a domain investment firm that has raised more than $125 million from private investors, including Maveron, the venture firm backed by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz.
Nonsense, Ham says. The names are expensive only if you value them the way people like Martin do. The VCs and bankers, who were late to the domain gold rush, assess names by calculating the pay-per-click ad revenue and attaching a multiple based on how long it would take to pay off the investment.
Viewed that way, Ham's personal portfolio alone is worth roughly $300 million. But some of Ham's recent domain purchases would also look silly: They'd take 15 or 20 years just to justify the price, and that assumes continuation of the pay-per-click model.
But Ham is taking a longer view. The Web, he says, is becoming cluttered with parked pages. The model is amazingly efficient -- lots of money for little work --but Ham argues that Internet users will soon grow weary of it all.
He also expects Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to find ways to effectively combat typo-squatting. Some browsers can already fix typos; Internet Explorer catches unregistered domains and redirects visitors to a Microsoft page -- in effect controlling traffic the same way that Ham is doing with .cm. "The heat is rising," Ham says.
When Ham buys a domain now, he's not doing pay-per-click math but rather sizing it up as a potential business. Reinvent Technology aims to turn his most valuable names into mini media companies, based on hundreds of niche categories.
Among the first he'd like to launch, not surprisingly, is Religion.com. Ham recently leased the entire 27th floor in his Vancouver building and is now hiring more than 150 designers, engineers, salespeople, and editorial folks.
Much of that effort is going into developing search tools based more on meaning and less on keywords. "Google is only so useful," Ham says.
The aim is to apply a meaning-based, or "semantic," system across swaths of sites, luring customers from direct navigation and search engines alike. Religion.com would then become an anchor to which scores of other sites would be tied.
"It's time to build out the virtual real estate," Ham says. "There's so much more value in these names than pay-per-click." Seeman's patent application even mentions the possibility of turning Web traffic from Cameroon and other future foreign partners into full-fledged portals.
It's all part of the master plan, as Ham aims to become the first domainer to move from the ranks of at-home name hunter to Internet titan. Smaller players have been selling out to VC-backed groups, and Ham expects that the best names will eventually be owned by just a handful of companies.
If he bets right, he might very well be one of them. "If you control all the domains," he says, "then you control the Internet."
[Via - The man who owns the Internet]
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Voting for the Worst on ‘American Idol’ Makes Money for an Entrepreneur
There is something about “American Idol” that extracts intense emotions from the audience: devotion for the contestants, perhaps, or passion for the songs. For Dave Della Terza, it elicits utter disgust. But it also turns a profit.
Frustrated by what he called the manipulative nature of the televised singing competition, Mr. Della Terza started encouraging readers of a reality television message board five years ago to vote for the contestants they deemed the worst singers.
The idea spawned a Web site, Vote for the Worst, which received widespread attention last year for supporting the singer Sanjaya Malakar as he advanced in the competition.
For Mr. Della Terza, what started as a hobby has become a business. Last year, the site had revenue of roughly $40,000, Mr. Della Terza said, mostly through Google Ads. While some of the income paid for computer servers and legal fees, the site still made a profit, allowing Mr. Della Terza to take some days off work to maintain the increasingly popular site.
Mr. Della Terza is far from the only person cashing in on the “American Idol” juggernaut. The publisher of the popular “Chicken Soup for the Soul” book series is promoting an Idol-themed edition. Walt Disney World is adding an Idol attraction to its Hollywood Studios theme park. Royal Caribbean International is embarking on Idol cruises.
But Vote for the Worst is unique, not only because it openly mocks the competition but also because it was formed spontaneously by an Internet-connected group of television viewers.
“It didn’t start out as a moneymaking venture; it wasn’t an attempt to leech off the ‘American Idol’ brand,” Mr. Della Terza said. “It started as a joke. But people really enjoyed it.”
The site now routinely breaks “Idol” news. In the first week of March, the site recorded 2.7 million page views as it reported rumors that a contestant, David Hernandez, had a background as a male stripper. Mr. Hernandez was voted off the show last week.
Mr. Della Terza said he did not expect to resemble a gossip columnist anytime soon. Still, the site has unintentionally become a font of “Idol” stories. Reports by Vote for the Worst in January that two “Idol” contestants had professional singing backgrounds subsequently became fodder for the news media. (Any person who is not under contract is eligible to audition.)
“We always post stuff on the site the producers don’t want you to know,” Mr. Della Terza said. “We don’t go out of our way to dig up dirt, but if it falls in our laps, obviously we’ll post it.”
The site’s fame rose last season when the radio personality Howard Stern repeatedly mentioned the site and encouraged listeners to vote to keep Mr. Malakar on the show.
In a conference call with reporters last month, Nigel Lythgoe, the executive producer of “American Idol,” said he did not believe online voting campaigns have any effect. “There are too many people who vote,” he said.
Still, Mr. Lythgoe’s mention of Vote for the Worst testified to the site’s significance, which still seems to surprise Mr. Della Terza, 25, an Illinois resident who works in information technology and teaches part time at a community college. A camera crew from a local television station once walked into his classroom to request an interview, he said, prompting him to conceal some details about his personal life from that point on. A volunteer now handles media requests for the site.
Mr. Della Terza started watching “Idol” in its second season. By season four, the worst-vote effort moved to its own Web site; in season five of “Idol,” the site turned a modest profit; and last year, Mr. Della Terza’s site became a limited liability company to help protect its operators from any potential legal action. The show is now in it’s seventh season.
The production company responsible for “American Idol,” FremantleMedia, has delivered three cease-and-desist letters to the site, most recently in January, accusing the site of using copyrighted content without permission. A lawyer representing the site argued that fair use covered most of the content, but the site agreed to remove the “Idol” logo from its pages.
The site’s success has prompted Mr. Della Terza to ponder the post-“Idol” future of the so-bad-it’s-good brand.
“We have to think long term somehow and try to keep the site going,” he said in an interview last week. Mr. Della Terza, who had a star turn on “The Late Show With David Letterman” last year, has batted around a television show proposal with friends, but he said laughingly that “no one’s come calling about that yet.”
For now, the site is sticking with “Idol.” Mr. Della Terza’s efforts to elicit votes for the worst contestants on other reality shows, including “The Next Great American Band” and “America’s Got Talent,” never held the same appeal.
“It’s never as fun,” Mr. Della Terza said. “I don’t think people take those shows as seriously.”
[Via - NYTimes.Com]
Frustrated by what he called the manipulative nature of the televised singing competition, Mr. Della Terza started encouraging readers of a reality television message board five years ago to vote for the contestants they deemed the worst singers.
The idea spawned a Web site, Vote for the Worst, which received widespread attention last year for supporting the singer Sanjaya Malakar as he advanced in the competition.
For Mr. Della Terza, what started as a hobby has become a business. Last year, the site had revenue of roughly $40,000, Mr. Della Terza said, mostly through Google Ads. While some of the income paid for computer servers and legal fees, the site still made a profit, allowing Mr. Della Terza to take some days off work to maintain the increasingly popular site.
Mr. Della Terza is far from the only person cashing in on the “American Idol” juggernaut. The publisher of the popular “Chicken Soup for the Soul” book series is promoting an Idol-themed edition. Walt Disney World is adding an Idol attraction to its Hollywood Studios theme park. Royal Caribbean International is embarking on Idol cruises.
But Vote for the Worst is unique, not only because it openly mocks the competition but also because it was formed spontaneously by an Internet-connected group of television viewers.
“It didn’t start out as a moneymaking venture; it wasn’t an attempt to leech off the ‘American Idol’ brand,” Mr. Della Terza said. “It started as a joke. But people really enjoyed it.”
The site now routinely breaks “Idol” news. In the first week of March, the site recorded 2.7 million page views as it reported rumors that a contestant, David Hernandez, had a background as a male stripper. Mr. Hernandez was voted off the show last week.
Mr. Della Terza said he did not expect to resemble a gossip columnist anytime soon. Still, the site has unintentionally become a font of “Idol” stories. Reports by Vote for the Worst in January that two “Idol” contestants had professional singing backgrounds subsequently became fodder for the news media. (Any person who is not under contract is eligible to audition.)
“We always post stuff on the site the producers don’t want you to know,” Mr. Della Terza said. “We don’t go out of our way to dig up dirt, but if it falls in our laps, obviously we’ll post it.”
The site’s fame rose last season when the radio personality Howard Stern repeatedly mentioned the site and encouraged listeners to vote to keep Mr. Malakar on the show.
In a conference call with reporters last month, Nigel Lythgoe, the executive producer of “American Idol,” said he did not believe online voting campaigns have any effect. “There are too many people who vote,” he said.
Still, Mr. Lythgoe’s mention of Vote for the Worst testified to the site’s significance, which still seems to surprise Mr. Della Terza, 25, an Illinois resident who works in information technology and teaches part time at a community college. A camera crew from a local television station once walked into his classroom to request an interview, he said, prompting him to conceal some details about his personal life from that point on. A volunteer now handles media requests for the site.
Mr. Della Terza started watching “Idol” in its second season. By season four, the worst-vote effort moved to its own Web site; in season five of “Idol,” the site turned a modest profit; and last year, Mr. Della Terza’s site became a limited liability company to help protect its operators from any potential legal action. The show is now in it’s seventh season.
The production company responsible for “American Idol,” FremantleMedia, has delivered three cease-and-desist letters to the site, most recently in January, accusing the site of using copyrighted content without permission. A lawyer representing the site argued that fair use covered most of the content, but the site agreed to remove the “Idol” logo from its pages.
The site’s success has prompted Mr. Della Terza to ponder the post-“Idol” future of the so-bad-it’s-good brand.
“We have to think long term somehow and try to keep the site going,” he said in an interview last week. Mr. Della Terza, who had a star turn on “The Late Show With David Letterman” last year, has batted around a television show proposal with friends, but he said laughingly that “no one’s come calling about that yet.”
For now, the site is sticking with “Idol.” Mr. Della Terza’s efforts to elicit votes for the worst contestants on other reality shows, including “The Next Great American Band” and “America’s Got Talent,” never held the same appeal.
“It’s never as fun,” Mr. Della Terza said. “I don’t think people take those shows as seriously.”
[Via - NYTimes.Com]
How To Make Money From Baby Posters
Consumers are never too young for a little gravanity, particularly when proud parents are buying it for them. Enter 5starbaby.com, which offers personalized birth announcements fashioned after movie advertisement posters.
Each movie poster birth announcement from 5starbaby is tailor-made for the new arrival, complete with all the critical “stats” about the baby’s birth and the names of loved ones as "supporting cast." Parents are listed as "producers," the doctor is named as "director" and the hospital is listed as the "filmed in" setting, for example. "Critics' quotes" can also be included, as can "catering" by the mother and options for virtually any other special people or ideas the parents want listed. "Ratings" given are "B" for boy, "G" for girl or "T" for twins. Movie poster birth announcements are 5-by-8-inch mini posters; pricing begins at USD 2.50 each with envelopes included. 5starbaby.com also offers large poster formats ranging from USD 25 to USD 120 each, and gift certificates are available for baby showers or other occasions.
Buffalo, NY-based 5starbaby.com will ship orders anywhere in the world, but localized versions in other languages are a natural next step. One to bring to proud parents and gift-givers around the globe!
Each movie poster birth announcement from 5starbaby is tailor-made for the new arrival, complete with all the critical “stats” about the baby’s birth and the names of loved ones as "supporting cast." Parents are listed as "producers," the doctor is named as "director" and the hospital is listed as the "filmed in" setting, for example. "Critics' quotes" can also be included, as can "catering" by the mother and options for virtually any other special people or ideas the parents want listed. "Ratings" given are "B" for boy, "G" for girl or "T" for twins. Movie poster birth announcements are 5-by-8-inch mini posters; pricing begins at USD 2.50 each with envelopes included. 5starbaby.com also offers large poster formats ranging from USD 25 to USD 120 each, and gift certificates are available for baby showers or other occasions.
Buffalo, NY-based 5starbaby.com will ship orders anywhere in the world, but localized versions in other languages are a natural next step. One to bring to proud parents and gift-givers around the globe!
Small Businesses Offer Alternatives to Gang Life
In Los Angeles, a corporation that runs several small businesses is demonstrating that the training and discipline of working in a small company can make a big contribution to changing the lives of former gang members.
The corporation, Homeboy Industries, runs a silkscreen business, for example, that produced revenue of $1.1 million last year from sales of custom T-shirts and other apparel for radio stations running promotions and college and private groups holding events. The business employs former gang members to make the T-shirts and uses the money to help offset the corporation’s expenses. Homeboy Silkscreen started 12 years ago in a converted warehouse under a freeway overpass near downtown Los Angeles and now has 18 employees.
Homeboy Bakery has a new plant that has $3 million in ovens and machinery and its managers hope to produce millions of dollars in revenue within a year or two, said the master baker, Alvaro Ocegueda. He supervises 25 former gang members who have become bakers under his guidance and with professional training at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, a two-year community college.
There is also a Homegirl Café, that has a staff of 27 girls who were “gang impacted” either as auxiliary gang members or as residents of neighborhoods under gang influence. The cafe has brought in more than $220,000 in five months of serving breakfast and lunch six days a week, said Patricia Zarate, who cooks for and manages the business.
Homeboy Maintenance takes in about $6,000 a month, and a Homeboy retail store sold $25,000 in Homeboy shirts and caps in a recent three-month period.
Though it may sound like a budding conglomerate, Homeboy is a nonprofit charitable corporation that last year had a budget of $5 million and goals that emphasize rehabilitation over revenue.
“The aim of the cash-producing businesses is that they bring in enough to pay for the free services,” said the Rev. Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries in East Los Angeles two decades ago and is now its executive director. Those services include mental therapy for former gang members, housing assistance, job development counseling and tattoo removal treatments.
The tattoo removals are not a fashion statement but a safety concern. Gang tattoos are a marker of the rivalries among the 26,000 members of Los Angeles’s 250 gangs, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Many gangs have been in existence for decades, and, police department figures show, their activities in the last five years have resulted in 12,000 assaults, 10,000 robberies, 784 homicides and 500 rapes.
Twenty years ago, when he was assigned to Dolores Mission Church, the poorest parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles , Father Boyle decided to try employment as a way to break the cycle of gangs, crime and imprisonment for the neighborhood’s young men. He tried to persuade businesses to hire reforming gang members through a parish organization he called Jobs for a Future. Then, in 1992, he bought an abandoned bakery with a contribution from Ray Stark, the Hollywood producer (“Funny Girl,”, “California Suite,” and “Annie” among others). Father Boyle put a half dozen former gang members — “homeboys” in street parlance — to work cleaning up the bakery and producing tortillas for sale. Tortilla sales led to making bread for a large baking company that supplied restaurants.
That ultimately led to Homeboy bakers being trained at Mi Vida-My Life, a family bakery run by Mr. Ocegueda, who tutored them in the mystical tradition of baking. “You knead the dough by hand and all of the tensions and the spirit you are feeling go into the bread,” Mr. Ocegueda said in an interview.
Homeboy Bakery was offered a grant to buy an automatic dough mixer, Mr. Ocegueda said. “But Father Greg said no, it is better to have them knead by hand because we can employ more people.”
The assignment seems anachronistic because Homeboy Bakery, with its gleaming new ovens and storage bins, is now housed in the Fran and Ray Stark Homeboy Industries headquarters, an $8.5 million center built with philanthropic contributions and opened last October.
But Homeboy’s emphasis is on putting gang members to work. “Our most important task is job training,” Father Boyle said in a telephone interview from Italy, where he is on a three-month sabbatical to write a book on Homeboy’s work in reclaiming lives. Indeed, Mr. Ocegueda’s assignment is to double the number of Homeboy bakers to 50 next year. The jobs pay $9 to $10 an hour, with health benefits after the employee is on the job three months. The aim is to introduce gang members to the discipline of work and eventually to graduate them to jobs in the commercial marketplace.
The Homeboy organization conducts thousands of job development interviews every year, with Father Boyle seeing more than 50 people a day. In his current absence, the chief operating officer, Veronica Vargas, is taking on that work. The organization is now compiling a database of all the people who have been helped or treated through the years, said Mona Hobson, director of development.
The organization is also anticipating expansion. The new Homeboy headquarters, a few blocks from Los Angeles City Hall, “gives us a chance to reach out to African-American gangs; our focus is countywide,” Father Boyle said.
The new center has spurred ideas for growth among supervisors of the businesses, some of whom were once troubled youths but not gang members. “I was a tagger,” a graffiti painter, said Rosaliano Mendez, who heads the maintenance business. “I dropped out of school, but I went back and now I’m studying for an associate degree in business.”
Mr. Mendez sees opportunity for expansion in commercial office cleaning. Eric Bennett, who heads the retail operation, said he “met Father Greg when I was in some trouble.” Mr. Bennett said he was hopeful that “we can spread the Homeboy brand in off- campus stores not only in California but across the country.”
Homeboy Industries’ board, whose members are business and professional people, would like to see expansion. “I think the bakery should be bringing in $4 million to $5 million in revenue per year,” said David Adams, the chairman of real estate investment firms in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles and the chief fund-raiser for the new Homeboy headquarters.
At the moment, the bakery is close to signing a big order for bread and pastries from a chain of coffeehouse restaurants and is seeking other big customers.
Ruben Rodriguez, who with his wife, Cristina, heads the silk screen business, also says he believes expansion is possible. A big factor for Mr. Rodriguez, one of the longest-serving Homeboy supervisors — “I met Father Greg at a bad time in my life.” — is that “Father Greg does all the marketing” for Homeboy products and services.
A question for Homeboy Industries, which is common to all small businesses, is whether the company could go on and prosper without its entrepreneurial founder. Father Boyle, 54 and healthy today, survived leukemia six years ago.
“Several years ago, I might have doubted that it could,” said Michael Hennigan, president of the Homeboy directors and founder of a Los Angeles law firm. “But today I think the organization is large enough and talent from the Jesuit order and elsewhere would come forward. The organization will go on and prosper.”
[Via - New York Times]
The corporation, Homeboy Industries, runs a silkscreen business, for example, that produced revenue of $1.1 million last year from sales of custom T-shirts and other apparel for radio stations running promotions and college and private groups holding events. The business employs former gang members to make the T-shirts and uses the money to help offset the corporation’s expenses. Homeboy Silkscreen started 12 years ago in a converted warehouse under a freeway overpass near downtown Los Angeles and now has 18 employees.
Homeboy Bakery has a new plant that has $3 million in ovens and machinery and its managers hope to produce millions of dollars in revenue within a year or two, said the master baker, Alvaro Ocegueda. He supervises 25 former gang members who have become bakers under his guidance and with professional training at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, a two-year community college.
There is also a Homegirl Café, that has a staff of 27 girls who were “gang impacted” either as auxiliary gang members or as residents of neighborhoods under gang influence. The cafe has brought in more than $220,000 in five months of serving breakfast and lunch six days a week, said Patricia Zarate, who cooks for and manages the business.
Homeboy Maintenance takes in about $6,000 a month, and a Homeboy retail store sold $25,000 in Homeboy shirts and caps in a recent three-month period.
Though it may sound like a budding conglomerate, Homeboy is a nonprofit charitable corporation that last year had a budget of $5 million and goals that emphasize rehabilitation over revenue.
“The aim of the cash-producing businesses is that they bring in enough to pay for the free services,” said the Rev. Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries in East Los Angeles two decades ago and is now its executive director. Those services include mental therapy for former gang members, housing assistance, job development counseling and tattoo removal treatments.
The tattoo removals are not a fashion statement but a safety concern. Gang tattoos are a marker of the rivalries among the 26,000 members of Los Angeles’s 250 gangs, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Many gangs have been in existence for decades, and, police department figures show, their activities in the last five years have resulted in 12,000 assaults, 10,000 robberies, 784 homicides and 500 rapes.
Twenty years ago, when he was assigned to Dolores Mission Church, the poorest parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles , Father Boyle decided to try employment as a way to break the cycle of gangs, crime and imprisonment for the neighborhood’s young men. He tried to persuade businesses to hire reforming gang members through a parish organization he called Jobs for a Future. Then, in 1992, he bought an abandoned bakery with a contribution from Ray Stark, the Hollywood producer (“Funny Girl,”, “California Suite,” and “Annie” among others). Father Boyle put a half dozen former gang members — “homeboys” in street parlance — to work cleaning up the bakery and producing tortillas for sale. Tortilla sales led to making bread for a large baking company that supplied restaurants.
That ultimately led to Homeboy bakers being trained at Mi Vida-My Life, a family bakery run by Mr. Ocegueda, who tutored them in the mystical tradition of baking. “You knead the dough by hand and all of the tensions and the spirit you are feeling go into the bread,” Mr. Ocegueda said in an interview.
Homeboy Bakery was offered a grant to buy an automatic dough mixer, Mr. Ocegueda said. “But Father Greg said no, it is better to have them knead by hand because we can employ more people.”
The assignment seems anachronistic because Homeboy Bakery, with its gleaming new ovens and storage bins, is now housed in the Fran and Ray Stark Homeboy Industries headquarters, an $8.5 million center built with philanthropic contributions and opened last October.
But Homeboy’s emphasis is on putting gang members to work. “Our most important task is job training,” Father Boyle said in a telephone interview from Italy, where he is on a three-month sabbatical to write a book on Homeboy’s work in reclaiming lives. Indeed, Mr. Ocegueda’s assignment is to double the number of Homeboy bakers to 50 next year. The jobs pay $9 to $10 an hour, with health benefits after the employee is on the job three months. The aim is to introduce gang members to the discipline of work and eventually to graduate them to jobs in the commercial marketplace.
The Homeboy organization conducts thousands of job development interviews every year, with Father Boyle seeing more than 50 people a day. In his current absence, the chief operating officer, Veronica Vargas, is taking on that work. The organization is now compiling a database of all the people who have been helped or treated through the years, said Mona Hobson, director of development.
The organization is also anticipating expansion. The new Homeboy headquarters, a few blocks from Los Angeles City Hall, “gives us a chance to reach out to African-American gangs; our focus is countywide,” Father Boyle said.
The new center has spurred ideas for growth among supervisors of the businesses, some of whom were once troubled youths but not gang members. “I was a tagger,” a graffiti painter, said Rosaliano Mendez, who heads the maintenance business. “I dropped out of school, but I went back and now I’m studying for an associate degree in business.”
Mr. Mendez sees opportunity for expansion in commercial office cleaning. Eric Bennett, who heads the retail operation, said he “met Father Greg when I was in some trouble.” Mr. Bennett said he was hopeful that “we can spread the Homeboy brand in off- campus stores not only in California but across the country.”
Homeboy Industries’ board, whose members are business and professional people, would like to see expansion. “I think the bakery should be bringing in $4 million to $5 million in revenue per year,” said David Adams, the chairman of real estate investment firms in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles and the chief fund-raiser for the new Homeboy headquarters.
At the moment, the bakery is close to signing a big order for bread and pastries from a chain of coffeehouse restaurants and is seeking other big customers.
Ruben Rodriguez, who with his wife, Cristina, heads the silk screen business, also says he believes expansion is possible. A big factor for Mr. Rodriguez, one of the longest-serving Homeboy supervisors — “I met Father Greg at a bad time in my life.” — is that “Father Greg does all the marketing” for Homeboy products and services.
A question for Homeboy Industries, which is common to all small businesses, is whether the company could go on and prosper without its entrepreneurial founder. Father Boyle, 54 and healthy today, survived leukemia six years ago.
“Several years ago, I might have doubted that it could,” said Michael Hennigan, president of the Homeboy directors and founder of a Los Angeles law firm. “But today I think the organization is large enough and talent from the Jesuit order and elsewhere would come forward. The organization will go on and prosper.”
[Via - New York Times]
Why Cracks Are Good For Business
The Crack Team is a home-service franchise, specializing in concrete crack repairs. Started in 1985 by Mike ‘The Ray Kroc of Crack’ Koder, The Crack Team was developed to address repetitive concerns of homeowners who were faced with the inevitable leaking cracks often found in basements. Koder, a homebuilder for over 30 years, began working with technology that was both a permanent and cost-effective solution to these leaky concerns. His methods were an ideal alternative to the otherwise costly expense of replacement or more in-depth repairs for concrete foundations and other concrete structures.
As Koder’s business grew to more than 1,000 customers a year, he moved forward and developed a line of exclusive crack repair products that are considered to be some of the best in the industry. He also paved the way for others to join the Crack Team by opening franchising opportunities to entrepreneurs in North America who are looking for a niche service company with year-round work availability, repairing basements, garages, sidewalks, and patios. The industry has little competition and the Crack Team franchise offers on-going technical training and support for both the proven system of crack repair, as well as the exclusive line of repair products.
The Crack Team has gained a national reputation as an innovative company with the highest standards for providing excellent customer service. The company mascot, Mr. Happy Crack, proposes the memorable company slogan, “A Dry Crack Is a Happy Crack”, has its own savvy marketing appeal and has spawned a line of successful and instantly recognizable apparel and novelty items which have been featured prominently on television, radio, and in the print media.
The Crack Team franchise opportunity is one of the fastest growing industries available. The company provides time-tested solutions in crack repair. Along with the training and support, The Crack Team also provides lead-generation programs to assist entrepreneurs in acquiring new customers. The exclusive line of products and other accessories are also part of the franchising package opportunity. Territories in North America are established selectively and are protected by the company. The Crack Team participates in industry association and provides access to a network of referrals on a national level.
As Koder’s business grew to more than 1,000 customers a year, he moved forward and developed a line of exclusive crack repair products that are considered to be some of the best in the industry. He also paved the way for others to join the Crack Team by opening franchising opportunities to entrepreneurs in North America who are looking for a niche service company with year-round work availability, repairing basements, garages, sidewalks, and patios. The industry has little competition and the Crack Team franchise offers on-going technical training and support for both the proven system of crack repair, as well as the exclusive line of repair products.
The Crack Team has gained a national reputation as an innovative company with the highest standards for providing excellent customer service. The company mascot, Mr. Happy Crack, proposes the memorable company slogan, “A Dry Crack Is a Happy Crack”, has its own savvy marketing appeal and has spawned a line of successful and instantly recognizable apparel and novelty items which have been featured prominently on television, radio, and in the print media.
The Crack Team franchise opportunity is one of the fastest growing industries available. The company provides time-tested solutions in crack repair. Along with the training and support, The Crack Team also provides lead-generation programs to assist entrepreneurs in acquiring new customers. The exclusive line of products and other accessories are also part of the franchising package opportunity. Territories in North America are established selectively and are protected by the company. The Crack Team participates in industry association and provides access to a network of referrals on a national level.
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